If Only
If Only
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Summary
NYPL's Best Books of 2024 A groundbreaking, potent novel about the destructive force of romantic love from award-winning writer Vigdis Hjorth
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If Only by Vigdis Hjorth
A groundbreaking, potent novel about the destructive force of romantic love from award-winning writer Vigdis Hjorth
An absorbing study of inner turmoil.. gripping * Guardian *
Addictive ... The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates. -- Susie Mesure * Financial Times *
Cult author Vigdis Hjorth's most important novel ... If Only exposes the tragedy of both longing for and attaining one's love object. -- Mia Levitin * Monocle *
Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. * Sheila Heti *
A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman's life in Hjorth's breathtaking latest ... Hjorth's narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida's feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn't "worth the sacrifice." Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she's acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist's self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It's an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. -- starred review * Publishers Weekly *
Hjorth emerges once again, in this novel, as not only a chronicler of the bruised and bloody, but their champion, an author who grants her characters the power to author their own stories themselves. -- Griffin Reed * Full Stop *
Hjorth, the Norwegian novelist behind 2022's Is Mother Dead, painstakingly chronicles a 30-year-old married woman's all-consuming and volatile romance with a married man, which blurs the lines between passion and love. -- Sophia Stewart * The Millions *
The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a small but formidable cult following in the US, and If Only should only grow their army. If Only starts off with enigmatic and addictive words of love and death that call to mind our favorite doomed affairs-painful and poetic, cursed and necessary, we must go back in time to understand how our heroine found herself on the brink, caught between passion and ruin. -- James Folta * Lit Hub; Most Anticipated Books of 2024 *
Feverish and intoxicating, If Only is a novel about the depths of a life-altering devotion and the connections between love, creativity, and self-making. * Foreword Reviews *
Who are we without passionate love, and do we need heartbreak to truly know ourselves? If Only chronicles one woman's questions of life, love and existence during a torrid love affair. -- B&N Reads
Everything here that sets my teeth on edge - the claustrophobia and repetition, the endless torture the lovers put each other through - is exactly what makes Hjorth's novel so remarkably, and horrifyingly, accomplished. -- Lucy Scholes * Telegraph *
Hjorth's portrait of her heroine's madness nearly always teeters towards comedy, which is one reason the book, though depicting suffering and shame, is such a pleasure to read. -- Stuart Jeffries * Observer *
In form and function, If Only paints a vivid portrait of desperation ... And for what? For love? For lust? For nothing? The question is not answered. It's simply two lives laid out for ultimate destruction. -- Frank Valish * Under the Radar *
Addictive ... The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates. -- Susie Mesure * Financial Times *
Cult author Vigdis Hjorth's most important novel ... If Only exposes the tragedy of both longing for and attaining one's love object. -- Mia Levitin * Monocle *
Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. * Sheila Heti *
A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman's life in Hjorth's breathtaking latest ... Hjorth's narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida's feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn't "worth the sacrifice." Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she's acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist's self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It's an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. -- starred review * Publishers Weekly *
Hjorth emerges once again, in this novel, as not only a chronicler of the bruised and bloody, but their champion, an author who grants her characters the power to author their own stories themselves. -- Griffin Reed * Full Stop *
Hjorth, the Norwegian novelist behind 2022's Is Mother Dead, painstakingly chronicles a 30-year-old married woman's all-consuming and volatile romance with a married man, which blurs the lines between passion and love. -- Sophia Stewart * The Millions *
The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a small but formidable cult following in the US, and If Only should only grow their army. If Only starts off with enigmatic and addictive words of love and death that call to mind our favorite doomed affairs-painful and poetic, cursed and necessary, we must go back in time to understand how our heroine found herself on the brink, caught between passion and ruin. -- James Folta * Lit Hub; Most Anticipated Books of 2024 *
Feverish and intoxicating, If Only is a novel about the depths of a life-altering devotion and the connections between love, creativity, and self-making. * Foreword Reviews *
Who are we without passionate love, and do we need heartbreak to truly know ourselves? If Only chronicles one woman's questions of life, love and existence during a torrid love affair. -- B&N Reads
Everything here that sets my teeth on edge - the claustrophobia and repetition, the endless torture the lovers put each other through - is exactly what makes Hjorth's novel so remarkably, and horrifyingly, accomplished. -- Lucy Scholes * Telegraph *
Hjorth's portrait of her heroine's madness nearly always teeters towards comedy, which is one reason the book, though depicting suffering and shame, is such a pleasure to read. -- Stuart Jeffries * Observer *
In form and function, If Only paints a vivid portrait of desperation ... And for what? For love? For lust? For nothing? The question is not answered. It's simply two lives laid out for ultimate destruction. -- Frank Valish * Under the Radar *
Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781839768880 |
| ISBN 10 | 1839768886 |
| Title | If Only |
| Author | Vigdis Hjorth |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
| Year published | 2024-09-17 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |